Mirantis Gets $10M in Funding to Boost OpenStack Cloud Push

Mirantis announced that it received $10 million in venture capital funding to increase its presence in the market for OpenStack services and support.

Mirantis, a systems integrator focused on open cloud solutions, particularly OpenStack, has announced that it closed $10 million in growth capital financing from Dell Ventures, Intel Capital and WestSummit Capital.
Mirantis officials said the investment will be used to accelerate Mirantis’ growth in the OpenStack market. The privately held company was previously financed through sales revenues. As Mirantis increases its presence in the OpenStack market, it will remain true to its focus of providing a vendor-neutral implementation of OpenStack, free of lock-in hooks or proprietary packaging, the company said.
“This funding signifies the fact that OpenStack is entering a realm where it is being considered a real force in the future cloud computing technology landscape,” Alex Freedland, co-founder and chairman of Mirantis, told eWEEK. “There has been significant hype around OpenStack in the last 12 months, but all investment funds behind OpenStack to date are bets that OpenStack will make it. This funding is the first growth capital round based on the evidence that OpenStack is getting significant traction in the industry and a further validation that Mirantis has been able to significantly influence the commercial adoption of OpenStack.”
Moreover, Freedland said, “We will use the money to further strengthen our products that are designed to further simplify the adoption of OpenStack by the industry, as well as to dramatically expand our sales and marketing channels.”

Combining its delivery model with the intellectual property that makes building a vendor-agnostic OpenStack cloud simple and predictable, Mirantis is striving to accelerate the adoption of OpenStack clouds by service providers, Software as a Service (SaaS) vendors and enterprises.

OpenStack is a global collaboration of developers and cloud computing technologists producing a ubiquitous open-source cloud computing platform for public and private clouds. The project aims to deliver solutions for all types of clouds by being simple to implement, massively scalable and feature rich. The technology consists of a series of interrelated projects delivering various components for a cloud infrastructure solution. Founded by Rackspace Hosting and NASA, OpenStack has grown to be a global software community of developers collaborating on a standard and massively scalable open-source cloud operating system.
Mirantis was an early OpenStack advocate, since the open-source project was introduced in 2010 and recently joined Dell and Intel as founding members of the OpenStack Foundation. Boris Renski, Mirantis co-founder and executive vice president, was elected to the board of the Foundation, which provides leadership to the community and guidance over development efforts.
“We believe that OpenStack is on its way to becoming a universal control plane for the entire application infrastructure fabric,” said Adrian Ionel, president and CEO of Mirantis, in a statement. “This phenomenon is transforming the industry. To help accelerate this transformation in a meaningful way, we need strong strategic investors like Dell Ventures, Intel Capital and WestSummit Capital. We consciously picked investors who aligned with us on vision and our commitment to accelerate OpenStack adoption around the world.”
Renski said Mirantis has the largest pool of engineering expertise in OpenStack in the market today, and helps service providers, SaaS vendors, and enterprises build and run OpenStack cloud infrastructure. The company has provided this expertise to customers in more than 30 OpenStack deployment projects over the past 18 months. Indeed, Mirantis has helped many early adopters of the OpenStack platform successfully launch production-grade clouds. Customers include organizations such as NASA, WebEx, Gap, PayPal, Internap, and AT&T.